Stoppard: An Brilliant Dramatist Who Invariably Raised the Temperature of the Stage

Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and often touching plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a